"Seven north Atlantic right whales have been found floating lifelessly in the Gulf of St Lawrence... in what is being described as a “catastrophic” blow to one of the world’s most endangered whales."

Minnesota party politics is a microcosm of the national situation. "Is Minnesota split into rival regions — a liberal island in the Twin Cities and a vast conservative sea in greater Minnesota?... The big battle not only pits Democrats against Republicans but rages within the parties — especially the DFL."

Retired greyhounds become professional blood donors. "Greyhounds represent the bulk of the donors, and with good reason
because they typically have a universal blood type that any dog can
receive. Greyhounds also have big neck veins that make drawing blood
easy."

"Up until four years ago, Rio Celeste, a 14-kilometer river in Costa
Rica’s Alajuela province, was a complete mystery to scientists, who
could not understand why its waters had an unusual turquoise color. And
then they realized that it wasn’t turquoise at all." (TL;DR "optical illusion")

The history of the papasan chair. "U.S. soldiers picked up papasan and mamasan during World War II and spread them throughout the Asia Pacific. Mamasan soon became slang for a madam of a brothel and, come the Vietnam War, papasan was referring to a pimp."

I won't review the entire book, which I am not adding to the blog category of recommended books (because it's exhaustively comprehensive rather than selective), but I will excerpt a few tidbits:

An uncommon word:
"That's plain, said I, as Tare and Tret..."

Tare is familiar to anyone who has worked a balance in a chemistry lab. Tret is related:

Tare and Tret, commercial terms, are deductions usually made from
the gross weight of goods. Tare is the weight of the case or covering,
box, or such-like, containing the goods; deducting this the net weight
is left. Tret is a further allowance (not now so commonly deducted) made
at the rate of 4 lb. for every 104 lb. for waste through dust, sand, etc.

What looks like an umlaut over an e...

Sadly, sadly he crossed the floor
And tirlëd at the pin:
Sadly went he through the door
Where sadly he cam' in.

The mark that prevents two adjacent vowels from combining into one
syllable is called a “diaeresis” or “trema.” You see it in French (naïve, Chloë, Noël) and in the pages of the New Yorker (coöperate, reëlection).

Although it doesn't separate two vowels here, I presume it serves the same function for the poet, indicating a pronunciation of two syllables as tirl-led, rather than mashed together as "turld."

And the word "tirl" defined: "To make a rattling or clattering sound by twirling or shaking (to tirl at the pin, or latch, of a door.")

Apostrophe usage in The Hunting of the Snark perhaps also for indicating a rhythm?:

When the verdict was called for, the Jury declined,
As the word was so puzzling to spell;
But they vetured to hope that the Snark wouldn't mind
Undertaking that duty as we'l.

And finally, what I interpret as a touching allusion to aging and death:

English uses the the diaeresis too, but it
has mostly been dropped -- I think chiefly because English typewriters
didn't have one. If you look in old books, you will occasionally see
words like coöperate, skiïng and naïve. As cooperate was at one point a new word... people used the diaeresis to make it clear how it was supposed to be pronounced.

Our check (for $2.50) arrived yesterday inside a fundraising appeal, and I was immediately suspicious. Unsolicited checks can be used as vehicles for scams in which your endorsement of the check commits you to obligations in the fine print. That did not appear to be the case with this check.

The accompanying letter from Steven L. Blumenthal states -

"The $2.50 check is real. You could put this letter aside, cassh the check, and forget all about our important laboratory research and national cancer education programs. But what I really hope you will do is return the $2.50 check along with your own gift of $10.00 or more to help in our fight against cancer."

My wife immediately logged on to access the Charity Navigator website (I would encourage everyone to bookmark this worthwhile site for future reference). The "National Cancer Research Institute" is, as indicated on their checks, a project of the Walker Cancer Research Institute, which is rated by Charity Navigator with one star (out of a possible four) for accountability and transparency, and 2/4 for finances. They note that over 50% of the funds raised are used for additional fundraising. So if you send them $10, about $5 of that will be used to send mailings to more people.

The public education portion of the solicitation consists of an
approximately 1/8 page list of "risk factors for breast cancer" on the
back side of the solicitation. Overall, 52.11% + 43.14% (95.25%) of all
donations go to either direct or indirect fundraising costs. The card
states that 3.81% of funds go directly to research program services (38
cents out of a $10.00 donation). Thus, of the $12,568,927 raised by
WCRI, $478,876.11 went directly to research. As a comparison, an NIH
grant awarded to a single Investigator for a specific research study
typically ranges from $25,000 to $250,000.

If you read the comments at Charity Navigator, you will see that some people say they cash the check and donate the money to "real" charities. Or you can keep the money. But note this - your name and address are on the check (with a scannable barcode), and...

Numerous complaints have been made by individuals who are receiving
dozens of letters soliciting funds and are unable to persuade the
charity to remove their names from the mailing list. The Center then sells those names to other charities, and people throughout the country
have complained of being inundated by requests for money that they can
not stop.

The choice is yours. My check went into the shredder.

Reposted from 2012, because after five years this organization is still sending out these checks, and the public continues to find this old post (over 10,000 views so far...) via Google. Perhaps it will be even easier to find if I make the date more recent.

Calvatia sculpta, commonly known as the sculpted puffball, the sculptured puffball, the pyramid puffball, and the Sierran puffball, is a species of puffball fungus in the family Agaricaceae. Attaining dimensions of up to 8 to 15 cm (3.1 to 5.9 in) tall by 8 to 10 cm (3.1 to 3.9 in) wide, the pear- or egg-shaped puffball is readily recognizable because of the large pyramidal or polygonal warts covering its surface.

Originally described from the Sierra Nevada, C. sculpta is found in mountainous areas in western North America, and was found in a Brazilian dune in 2008.

And it is edible:

Calvatia sculpta is edible, and said to be "choice" by some authors. The taste is described as "mild" and the flesh has no distinguishable odor. Arora recommends eating the puffball only when it is firm and white inside, as older specimens may have a distasteful iodine-like flavor. The puffball may be preserved by freezing fresh or partially cooked slices, but their flavor and texture will deteriorate unless cooked immediately after thawing. Recommended cooking techniques for puffball slices include sautéing and coating in batter before frying. C. sculpta was used as a traditional food of the Plains and Sierra Miwok Indians of North America, who called the fungus potokele or patapsi. Puffballs were prepared by drying them in the sun, grinding them with a mortar, and boiling them before eating with acorn soup.

Image cropped for size from the original at Reddit, where this comment by oilbird is relevant:

I study sensory systems (vision, hearing, etc) in birds and all
birds studied so far are, with out a doubt, incapable of hearing
ultrasound. In fact, the highest frequency at which they can hear is for
all birds much lower than humans. Most birds don't hear almost
anything above 6 KHz while humans go up to 20 KHz. Ultrasounds is
defined as being above the human range, so no birds is ever going to be
even remotely bothered by an ultrasound machine.
Edit: Holy shit, talking about scams. This shit is almost 600 bucks.
Says in their website is tuned to 20 KHz and humans can't hear it. as I
said above, if humans can't hear it then it will not affect birds in any
way, period.

24 July 2017

MADRID—The arsenal is a terrorist’s dream: 150 live hand grenades, 44 rocket propelled grenades, 1,450 9mm cartridges, 18 tear gas grenades, scores of triggers and detonators of various kinds, 102 explosive charges, and 264 blocks of plastic explosive. Such is the inventory of deadly materiel that was stolen from a military installation in Portugal on June 28 and is still missing.
Then, two days after that robbery, a van loaded with nitroglycerin was robbed in Barcelona, Spain. Those explosives have not been recovered either.
European authorities are worried, to say the least. These are not the unstable homemade munitions used in many recent terrorist attacks, they are military-grade. But precisely who took them, and for whom, remains a mystery...

In the June 28 incident, more than a dozen thieves stormed the military armory of Tancos, located about 100 miles from Lisbon...

The controversy in Portugal has caused a political tsunami, because the theft has brought to light the lamentable security measures of the Tancos base: The video surveillance system was damaged five years ago and had not been repaired, the motion sensors do not work, the wire fencing is vulnerable to a good pair of scissors, and the 25 watchtowers are in such bad shape soldiers don’t dare to climb them.

Rhainer Guillermo Ferreira was so jolted by
a scanning electron microscope image showing what looked like skinny,
branching tracheal tubes in a morpho wing that he called in another
entomologist for a second opinion. Guillermo Ferreira, then at Kiel
University in Germany, showed the image to a colleague who also was
“shocked,” he remembers. A third entomologist was called in. Shock all
around...

In the tough inner layers, male Z. lanei wings
form nanoscale spheres sandwiched between blankets of black
pigment–filled nanolayers. This setup can enhance reflections of blue
light and muddle other wavelengths.

The best piece I have ever read about the North Korea situation is an article by Mark Bowden in the most recent edition of The Atlantic.

As tensions flared in recent months,
fanned by bluster from both Washington and Pyongyang, I talked with a
number of national-security experts and military officers who have
wrestled with the problem for years, and who have held responsibility to
plan and prepare for real conflict. Among those I spoke with were
former officials from the White House, the National Security Council,
and the Pentagon; military officers who have commanded forces in the
region; and academic experts.

From these conversations, I learned
that the U.S. has four broad strategic options for dealing with North
Korea and its burgeoning nuclear program.

1. Prevention: A
crushing U.S. military strike to eliminate Pyongyang’s arsenals of mass
destruction, take out its leadership, and destroy its military. It would
end North Korea’s standoff with the United States and South Korea, as
well as the Kim dynasty, once and for all.

2. Turning the screws: A
limited conventional military attack—or more likely a continuing series
of such attacks—using aerial and naval assets, and possibly including
narrowly targeted Special Forces operations. These would have to be
punishing enough to significantly damage North Korea’s capability—but
small enough to avoid being perceived as the beginning of a preventive
strike. The goal would be to leave Kim Jong Un in power, but force him
to abandon his pursuit of nuclear ICBMs.

3. Decapitation:
Removing Kim and his inner circle, most likely by assassination, and
replacing the leadership with a more moderate regime willing to open
North Korea to the rest of the world.

4. Acceptance: The
hardest pill to swallow—acquiescing to Kim’s developing the weapons he
wants, while continuing efforts to contain his ambition.

Let’s consider each option. All of them are bad.

If the topic interests you and you would like to be able to discuss/debate the alternatives intelligently with friends, the article is essential background reading. For starters, pick one of the four options above that you would tentatively favor, then read the pros and cons of that choice.

I have featured Hans Rosling on a number of previous posts at TYWKIWDBI because I truly admire his style of presentation. The best hours of my academic life were spent behind or beside the podium in front of an classroom full of students, so I'm supersensitive to the nuances of lecturing. This guy has all the skills. He is recognized as a wizard at portraying otherwise-dry statistics in comprehensible visual forms (see his superb TED talk on the developing world). In addition his stage presence is captivating, and his use of English (as a second language) is excellent.

I'm not blogging today, but I wanted to put this up for you. I know everyone's life these days is one continuous TL;DR, but take my word for it, if you are interested in the world beyond your doorstep, this video is worth 15 minutes of your time. Or at least the first five, and then see if you can stop.

Reposted from 2015 to cleanse my mind. A lifelong (60+ year) best friend emailed me a link to a Mark Steyn video, identifying it as "the biggest story of the year." The video began by deploring the childlessness of European leaders (and Europeans in general), then devolved into frank Islamophobia and a broader xenophobia. This was done by presenting demographic data and concluding from those data that the Europeans who "built the modern world" will "be extinguished" by an overwhelming tide of brown-skinned invaders.

I needed the intellectual equivalent of the "eye bleach" recommended for "unseeing" internet images, and then I remembered this old post featuring one of Hans Rosling's presentations. He presents data that is probably equivalent to that which Mark Steyn employs, but does so with the perspective of a man of the Enlightenment, not a fearmonger.

Totally worth viewing if you've not seen it. And worth reviewing every now and then.

Washington Crossing the Delaware is a sonnet that was written in 1936 by David Shulman. The title and subject of the poem refer to the scene in the painting Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. The poem is noted for being an anagrammatic poem – in this case, a 14-line rhyming sonnet in which every line is an anagram of the title.

David Shulman was a lexicographe and cryptographer. Please note that these lines are not only anagrams, but also arranged as rhyming couplets.

"Jamel Dunn, 32, drowned on July 9 in Cocoa, Fla., a coastal city east of
Orlando. The teenagers, aged 14 to 16, filmed the incident as they
laughed and mocked Dunn, then posted the video to social media...

“He started to struggle and scream for help and they just laughed. They
didn’t call the police. They just laughed the whole time. He was just
screaming … for someone to help him...

The teens were identified and questioned by detectives investigating the
case, but they are unlikely to face charges. They were not directly
involved in Dunn’s drowning, and good Samaritan laws — which typically
involve protections for bystanders helping on the scene of an emergency —
don’t apply to the case, police said."

Police said there appeared to be little regret from the teens involved during and after the incident

“There was no remorse, only a smirk.”

Video embedded at the Washington Post does not depict the drowning, but does include an audio of the teens' taunting.

19 July 2017

When I was in college I earned my spending money working as a librarian (and had a room quite
literally above the library). So I was delighted to see a review in the Washington Post discussing a new book about... card catalogs.

This book about card catalogues, written and
published in cooperation with the Library of Congress, is beautifully
produced, intelligently written and lavishly illustrated. It also sent
me into a week-long depression. If you are a book lover of a certain
age, it might do the same to you.

“The
Card Catalog” is many things: a lucid overview of the history of
bibliographic practices, a paean to the Library of Congress, a memento
of the cherished card catalogues of yore and an illustrated collection
of bookish trivia. The text provides a concise history of literary
compendiums from the Pinakes of the fabled Library of Alexandria to the
advent of computerized book inventory databases, which began to appear
as early as 1976. The illustrations are amazing: luscious reproductions
of dozens of cards, lists, covers, title pages and other images
guaranteed to bring a wistful gleam to the book nerd’s eye.

For someone who grew up in and around libraries, it is also a poignant reminder of a vanished world.

Now, waxing nostalgic about card catalogues
or being an advocate for the importance of libraries is a mug’s game.
You can practically feel people glancing up from their iPhones to smile
tolerantly at your eccentricity. My response to this, after an initial
burst of profanity, is to explain (again) why libraries are essential to
narrowing the inequality gap, and why the Internet is not an adequate
substitute for books or libraries.

“The
Card Catalog” is a heady antidote to the technophilia threatening our
culture. The book is especially illuminating on the powerful, if
overlooked, properties of the humble catalogue card, some 79 million of
which were printed annually at the system’s peak in 1969. Each one is a
perfect melding of design and utility, a marvel of informational
compression and precision.

After college, while I was in graduate school, I started my own "card catalogue," visiting a university library weekly to transcribe references in professional journals onto literally tens of thousands of 3"x5" lined cards, which I filed in cabinets in my office - a handy source for information in the preparation of lectures. Then the internet arrived...

I mourn the loss of the old card catalogs, not because I’m a Luddite,
but because the oaken trays of yesteryear offered the researcher an
element of random utility and felicitous surprise through encounters
with adjacent cards, information by chance that is different in kind
from the computer’s ramified but rigid order.

I've requested this new book from our local library (only 4 people ahead of me on the wait list).

...you'll end up in China. I remember hearing that as a child. Ignoring for a moment the problem of the magma and the gravitational conundrums one would encounter at the center, it's still untrue. I remember fiddling with a globe and discovering that I would end up somewhere in the middle of the south Indian Ocean.

As an adult I revisited this question and discovered that for most of the people on earth, the antipodes were in an ocean. It's a curious aspect of world geography - most of the large land masses are in the northern hemisphere, with more oceans in the south. And much of the land masses in the south are opposite northern oceans - Africa corresponds to the northern Pacific, and the Aussies would be in the middle of the Atlantic. It must be pure coincidence, though a nagging thought makes one wonder whether there could be a plate tectonic explanation for this.

Now you can explore this on your own. There's a website called Antipodes Map - draggable and zoomable in true Google Map fashion. Click on your location and it shows you what is on the opposite side of the earth.

I ultimately relied on Wikipedia’s list of federal political scandals in the U.S.,
but limited it to only the executive branch scandals that actually
resulted in a criminal indictment. I also decided to only go back as far
as Richard Nixon, whose participation in Watergate ultimately resulted
in him being the only sitting president to ever resign. This lets many
other scandal-ridden administrations off the hook—notably that of Warren
Harding and the Teapot Dome scandal, and of Ulysses S. Grant and the Whiskey Ring and Black Friday scandals—but so be it.

The chart only includes people who served in the
administration, and excludes others (like members of Congress and
private individuals) who may have also been swept up and indicted for
the same scandal. The “Convictions” list includes both those who went to
trial and were found guilty as well as those who plea bargained and
pleaded guilty. The “Prison Sentences” should be considered a minimum
figure, as Wikipedia's list wasn’t always clear on penalties and I wasn’t able to look all of the unclear ones up.

Beetles of the genus Diamphidia lay their eggs on the stems of shrubs from the Commiphora genus
– commonly known as frankincense and myrrh. The doting mothers then
coat their precious eggs with their own feces (that’s faeces for my UK
friends), which harden into a protective armor. As the eggs develop
through the instar and grub phases, the larvae will shed their poo
protection and burrow up to (down to?) three feet, where they make a
cocoon from sand and take a needed break. They may lay dormant for
several years before molting into pupae, and continue their life cycle.
This long dormancy period means that the Bushmen can find the cocoons
and larvae year-round and have a ready supply of poison, especially
important since mature beetles are not poisonous.

The Bushmen, also known as the San people, dig beside Commiphora host plants, such as Commiphora angolensis, in search of Diamphidia nigroornata, or Commiphora africana forDiamphidia vittatipennis. Once
collected, the Bushmen will squeeze the fluid from the larvae and
pupae, otherwise known as hemolymph, onto the shaft of their arrows, but
not the tip, to avoid “accidents.” Up to ten larvae could be applied to
one arrow, which is then dried over hot coals to bond the poison, which
maintains its lethal potential for up to a year.

More info at Nature's Poisons, a quite interesting website. The toxicity was originally assumed to be neurotoxicity and some cardiotoxicity, but recent studies suggest hemolysis as a primary mechanism.

"In Germany, Poland, Hungary and several other European countries, trail mix is called "student food" or "student snack" in the local languages. In New Zealand, trail mix is known as "scroggin" or "schmogle". The term is also used in some places in Australia but usage has only been traced back to the 1970s. Some claim that the name stands for sultanas, carob, raisins, orange peel, grains, glucose, imagination, and nuts or alternatively sultanas, chocolate, raisins and other goody-goodies including nuts; but this may be a false etymology.

The word gorp, a term for trail mix often used by hikers, is typically said to be an acronym for "good old raisins and peanuts" or its common ingredients "granola, oats, raisins, peanuts." The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1913 reference to the verb gorp, meaning "to eat greedily.""

It has been known for some time that some shallow-water corals use fluorescence as a protective mechanism:

...the pink and purple fluorescence in shallow waters act as a kind of
sunscreen. The fluorescent pigments absorb damaging wavelengths of light
and emit it as pink or purple light, protecting the single-celled
organisms called zooxanthellae that live symbiotically inside coral.
Zooxanthellae are photosynthetic and they provide the coral with food in
exchange for shelter.

But now the phenomenon has been observed in coral at low-light depths:

Coral may be converting blue light into orange-red light that penetrates
deeper into the coral tissue, where photosynthetic zooxanthellae live.
Fluorescence, by definition, is the absorption of light in one color and
the emission in another... Blue light may be good at penetrating water and for photosynthesis, but
it doesn’t penetrate the coral’s tissues well. And zooxanthellae can
live deep inside coral...

Mikhail Matz,
a coral scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, says he’s not
yet convinced this completely explains the function of the fluorescent
pigment in deep water corals. As humans with eyes, we tend focus on the
light coming from these coral. But maybe the glow isn’t the point. “The
fluorescence may not be the important aspect. It could be a side
effect,” he says. It could be that fluorescent proteins are actually
there just to absorb light as the part of some metabolism, and the glow
that we see is incidental to its true purpose.

What's worse than a "grammar Nazi?" Perhaps a "punctuation policeman."

Teachers have attacked the "punctuation police" who have marked down children's SATs for incorrectly drawn commas and semi-colons.
Frustrated staff complained about the new mark scheme on social media after children were penalised for drawing punctuation points at the wrong level or failing to draw apostrophes with sufficient curve. Teachers said that their pupils had been marked down for semi-colons which were too high on the line...

Some comments at the Telegraph article suggest that the problem lies with the teachers failing to instruct the students in the proper manner of denoting punctuation marks.

These are Purple Emperor and Lesser Emperor butterflies (Apatura genus) getting nutrients from the body of a dead frog. Butterflies that "puddle" at muddy spots or on scat or on carrion (as shown here) are seeking sodium, which is rarely found in plants (potassium is the principal cation in vegetation).

Mathematical card tricks are the best ones to learn, because no sleight-of-hand is required. A hat tip to Mark Frauenfelder for creating this video to illustrate the methodology of a clever trick posted at Greg Ross' Futility Closet.

Readers who are math enthusiasts may be able to explain to the rest of us how/why this trick works. I'm satisfied to accept it as magic.

Reposted from 2013 so I can relearn this trick before our upcoming family reunion.

“Open Pollinated” is a horticultural term meaning that the plant
will produce seeds naturally. When these seeds are planted they will
reliably reproduce the same plant as the parent. On the other hand,
hybrid corn is the result of controlled pollination of inbred plants.
These seeds are often sterile, and if they do germinate, will not
reliably produce the same plant as the parent. This means the farmer has
a perpetual reliance on the seed companies.

This dependence on a few seed/chemical giants is becoming more
and more uncomfortable for American consumers and farmers. Green Haven
Open Pollinated Seed Group is changing that. We are a nationwide
organization of seed producers based in western NY that are pooling out
efforts to offer the most beneficial varieties of quality open
pollinated Seed. By selection, Green Haven focuses on improving open
pollinated corn for silage, grain, and wildlife plots.

"Several years ago, a client brought me a box turtle that had been hit by
a car. I used fiberglass to repair his broken shell and then released
him in my woods. Recently, while walking on my hillside, I spotted an
odd pattern in the leaves. To my amazement, there was my old patient
with the fiberglass still on... years later! Sometimes, being a vet is
the best thing there is."

In a 2011 interview, Steven Tyler reminisced about his father, a Juilliard-trained
musician, and recalled "lying beneath his dad's piano as a
three-year-old, listening to him play classical music. That's where I got that Dream On chordage," he said.

Reposted from 2011 because the originally embedded video had undergone linkrot. So I'll use this opportunity to embed the original musci video and append some additional info.

A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads derive from the medieval French chanson balladée or ballade, which were originally "danced songs''... Sentimental ballads, also known as pop ballads, rock ballads or power ballads, are an emotional style of music that often deal with romantic and intimate relationships, and to a lesser extent, war (protest songs), loneliness, death, drug abuse, politics and religion, usually in a poignant but solemn manner... Aaron argues that the power ballad broke into the mainstream of American consciousness in 1976 as FM radio gave a new lease of life to earlier songs such as Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" (1971), Aerosmith's "Dream On" (1973), and Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" (1974).

For those who like me have wondered how Steven Tyler's voice held up over the years, here's his performance over 40 years later of a slightly-more concise version:

To paraphrase Will Rogers, I haven't seen an American Experience episode I didn't like. I have to admit I had low expectations for this one, thinking it would be rehash of the horrors of wartime medicine and the conditions in Andersonville etc., but instead it's a broader view of how a society copes (or doesn't cope) with massive numbers of largely unexpected casualties.

Before the war began neither the Union or the Confederacy had in place any mechanism for dealing with death and injury on the battlefield. No ambulances, no burial crews (and no designated cemeteries), no dogtags for ID, and not even a perceived responsibility to notify next-of-kin of a death. Bodies were left unburied and unidentified. IIRC, fully half of the casualties in the war who were eventually buried were labeled "Unknown."

This is a brief trailer for the 2012 program. The PBS link for the full-length program shows it to be "unavailable in my area" (I got the DVD from the library). At 2 hours run-time, it's a bit overlong (I did some fast-forwarding), but overall it was well worth viewing.

08 July 2017

If you're going to write a book, and the chapter titles will include: "Polyptoton," "Aposiopesis," "Merism," "Hyperbaton," "Anadiplosis," "Diacope," "Hendiadys," "Epistrophe," "Tricolon," "Epizeuxis," "Syllepsis," "Enallage," "Zeugma," "Chiasmus," "Catachresis," "Litotes," "Metonymy," "Pleonasm," "Epanalepsis," and even "Scesis Onomaton," then you'd better have excellent skills as a wordsmith, because your potential audience will undoubtedly be wary of what is expected to be boring material.

Fortunately this author (Mark Forsyth) has those skills, and he uses the rhetorical devices to explain them. Here is a brief excerpt from the chapter on pleonasm:

"Pleonasm is the use of unneeded words that are superfluous and unnecessary in a sentence that doesn't require them. It's repeating the same thing again twice, and it annoys and irritates people...

People who think like this lead terrible lives. They have never married, simply because they couldn't bear to hear the words:

Dearly beloved, we are gathered together in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation to join together this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony.

They can't enjoy Hamlet because of the unnecessary "that" in "To be or not to be, that is the question."

An interesting anecdote in the chapter on merism:

"In the medieval marriage service "sickness and health" were followed by: "to be bonny and buxom, in bed and at board, till death do us part."... How could a wife guarantee that she would be buxom?... the word buxom has changed in meaning over the years. The first citation in the OED comes from the twelfth century and is defined as "Obedient; pliant; compliant, tractable." The sense then changed to happy, then to healthy, and thence to plump.

Re hyperbaton:

"The importance of English word order is also the reason that the idea that you can't end a sentence with a preposition is utter hogwash. In fact, it would be utter hogwash anyway, and anyone who claims that you can't end a sentence with up, should be told up to shut. It is, as Shakespeare put it, such stuff as dreams are made on, but it's one of those silly English beliefs that flesh is heir to."

Re periodic sentences:

John of Gaunt's death scene in Richard II, which begins with "This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle..." adds nineteen additional lines before presenting the main verb: "...Is now leased out..."

We all know someone who uses parataxis:

"Parataxis is like this. It's good, plain English. It's one sentence. Then it's another sentence. It's direct. It's farmer's English. You don't want to buy my cattle. They're good cattle. You don't know cattle. I'm going to have a drink. Then I'm going to break your jaw. I'm a paratactic farmer. My cattle are the best in England."

In addition to the familiar iamb (te-TUM), trochee (Tumty), anapaest (te-te-TUM), and dactyl (TUM-te-ty) there are "strange feet like the choriamb (TUM-te-te-TUM) and the molossus (TUM! TUM! TUM!). But these strange ones have never really worked well in English, apart from the amphibrach (te-TUM-te), which is the basis of the limerick: "There was a young man from Calcutta..."

Is this comment true or is it playful nonsense? "The only reason that T.S. Eliot insisted on the middle initial was that he was panfully aware of what his name would have been without it, backwards." For a short while he became so paranoid that he decided to use his middle name instead and introduced himself as T Stearns Eliot. The phase did not last, but it's probably why his first great poem was called "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Re congeries:

"Shakespeare loved lists, especially when he was insulting people: "... you starveling, you wolf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish! O for breath to utter what is like thee! You tailor's-yard, you sheath, you bow-case; you vile standing-tuck..."

The technical name for a heap of insults is bdelygmia, and the best thing about a good bdelygmia (aside from the pronunciation: no letter is silent) is that you don't even need to know what any of the words mean..."

By now you already know whether you'd enjoy reading this book or not. I did.

Posted with a tip of the blogging hat to reader Paul Parkinson, who identified this book as the source of a quote in a previous TYWKIWDBI post.

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Readers - especially old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, and long-lost relatives - are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net